James Cook (1728-1779) was the first English sailor to pass close to New Caledonia during his second Pacific expedition. He was to rename the Big Land in Caledonia, evoking the old Latin name for Scotland.
Twenty years later the French explores the New Caledonia, discovering the cannibalism practice among the tribes. Bruni d’Entrecasteaux and his team was sent by Louis XIV to find La Pérouse, their stay was longer and less pleasant than Cook’s one. D’Entrecastaux didn’t complete his Austral expedition, he took the scurvy and left his company on 20th July 1793 near Java. The collected artifacts were confiscated in Batavia, now Jakarta, by Dutch, which were on war with French in the opposite part of the world. While the crew was jailed for some months. From this expeditions France got only a dozen of artifact: statues, hair ornaments and an axe.
During the 19th century New Caledonia’s representation swung among two extremes. On the one hand, there is the exotic idea of a fertile land, where nature stands in profusion, in paintings contrasts the industrial revolution onwards. On the other side, there is the proud, free and warrior population refusing to subdue to Enlightening men, generously sent by France. A clear example is the cover of Travel’s Diary by Horace Castelli (1825-1889), where he represents an old man removing a victim’s eye. Jules Férat (1829-1889) shows an opera of the Commander Rivière during the 1878 revolution: white officials were dressing gloves and clean uniforms, while Kanak’s warriors were always naked with koteka covering their penis and were bloody headhunters.
Contrary to those, Léon Bennett (1839-1916) had stayed really in New Caledonia as Colonial Officer and Head of Topography for three long years of turmoil, in consequence of lands’ expropriation. He would leave the Big Land when Atai conflicts started, he took with him a series of images which Jules Verne will use to illustrate his exotic romances. Only with the photography the consideration for Caledonians turned more realistically, leaving behind myths for field ethnological research. In 1929 The Swiss naturalist Fritz Sarasin published “Ethnography of Kanak from New Caledonia and Loyauté Islands”, after his journey in 1911-12. One year later Maurice Leenhardt published “New Caledonia’s Ethnological notes”:
In 1889 a Kanak village was built in Paris for the Universal Expo. For six months a typical circle house of 12m height was standing with inside the Tribal chief’s son, an assistant and a twelve years girl. Newspapers were writing more about the astonishment of Parisians than of Melanesians, which were transported in a total and extremely different world, but totally indifferent to what was going around them. The article defined them anthropophagus.